Laughter is the religion of love

While troops moved in on
Bagdad last night, we sat
in a car and talked
till the moon quit the sky.

We turned from the suffering
the phlegmon of war,
forgot the children born
with cannons for brains,
bullets for food:
forgot the girls maimed
by the dribblings of nervous men,
the upholders of “right.”

As we kissed we ran
through a fantasy world
where streams bred ﬁsh
not to be caught but to swim,
where birds ﬂew fearless
in the trees below the sun,
and lovers sang of love—
not in the past tense, a lament,
but in a now of permanent fruition.

Laughter is the religion of love:
and we laughed while the world crept
to the edge of its perch last night,
and we sang and we died with the dawn.